Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Management (BCM) Services
| “This detailed BC/DR plan [from Consonus] has given us peace of mind that our customer data and essential business systems are protected in the event of a disaster. We now have policies in place to safeguard our business against outages, downtime, outside data threats, even hurricanes. Consonus covered it all.” --President and COO Allen Read, M3 Accounting Services |
To ensure business continuity, a comprehensive IT disaster recovery plan is a critical requirement for effective IT governance. Once viewed as an IT insurance policy, disaster recovery not only addresses response challenges and compliance issues, but can give your business a real competitive advantage.
Disaster recovery consists of coping with and recovering from an IT crisis that moves work to an alternative system in a non-routine way. A top-down approach to successful disaster recovery planning begins with a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). A business impact analysis enumerates and prioritizes business-critical disaster recovery services, establishing Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) against a quantifiable disaster recovery plan.
Far beyond a simple offsite backup and recovery plan, a thorough IT disaster recovery plan facilitates business continuity by addressing the data, hardware, software, personnel, facilities, and recovery procedures necessary for a business to restore critical IT services in the event of natural or man-made disaster.
Crisis Management Planning
A strategic part of a comprehensive Business Continuity Management solution, Consonus crisis management planning helps senior management effectively and efficiently respond to business interruptions. Its purpose is to improve response capabilities with actionable plans tailored to address relevant events that can significantly impact business operations. The end result outlines steps and procedures for management to follow in the event of a crisis.
Leveraging business continuity management best practices and expert professional IT services, Consonus crisis management planning encompasses:
- Crisis detection and preliminary assessment
- Notification and escalation
- Damage assessment
- Crisis command center procedures
- Support activities
- Administrative procedures
- Resource requirements
- Review of existing crisis response policies and procedures
- Comparative analysis between current capabilities and what is needed to achieve response objectives
Table Top Exercises: Tools to Test Your Disaster Recovery Plans
A table top exercise is the closest thing to a real event that the majority of companies will ever encounter. Most companies never face the horrific events of a 911 or a Katrina-type disaster, but many experience small scale events that they are often unprepared for -- events that can escalate into something much worse.
To better prepare business for the "what if" scenario, Consonus has incorporated table top exercises into our business continuity management solutions offerings as a way to test just how prepared an organization is in the event of a disruption. These exercises can be as simple as a line by line walk thru of your disaster recovery plan or a full-scale interactive exercise involving multiple government agencies and vendors. Regardless, table top exercises are essential to validating business continuity management strategies, ensuring the organization responds efficiently and appropriately when confronted with disaster.
